An artist with old Amarillo ties will blow back into town Friday, but despite the subject of many of his recent works, he’s not coming in on an ill wind.

Rick Peters, who was Amarillo Museum of Art’s artist in residence from 1994 to 1997, will show his latest works in a show with a pair of Arizona artists at Process Art House, 700 S. Van Buren St.

“Forces of Nature” runs Friday through July 9 at the gallery. The show opens with a free reception at 7 p.m. Friday.

“Rick’s work combines elements of the macabre, the absurd, and the real to create a dynamic and strange view of the world through his art,” PAH owner Jacob Breeden said. “It’s a version of Americana unlike anything else being created here on the High Plains. Rick is constantly exploring the part of the human mind that can’t help but to buy a ticket to the sideshow.”

Peters said early childhood experiences left him with an affinity for the “offbeat or weird,” not to mention scary.

Take, for instance, the series of tornado paintings that will be featured in the show: “Tornadoes, as horrible and as tragic as they are and they’ve been so deadly this spring, (make me) think back to my first notion of a tornado was with Dorothy and ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ where she was transported to a really colorful place.

“That kind of idea, of how the imaginary world collides with the real, seems to lace through my work throughout the years.”

Peters, a Kansas native, came to AMoA thanks to a connection with former curator Patrick McCracken, a fellow University of Kansas graduate.

“I like the quirkiness of the town,” he continued. “I’m kind of crazy and weird so some of that quirkiness around Amarillo fit me.”

That self-described weirdness comes out in his art, some of which is inspired by sideshow culture and some of which is largely inspired by underground comic book artists like Robert Crumb.

“Confession time: You know, you’re in your younger years and what’s on your mind most of the time? In these comic books, there’s no-holds-barred in subject matter,” he said, subtly referencing the sexual content in such books.

Though some of his works feature nudity or other sexual content, Peters is a little bashful about it.

“There’s a whole scad of them that you couldn’t put in the newspaper and I’m not bringing,” he said. “I self-censor. My father was a minister, and I still go around feeling half-guilty for what I do, but that’s me.”

Peters will be showing with Mariana Bartolomeo and Stuart Ross Snider, a photographer and a sculptor, respectively.

“Rick’s work, paired with Marianna’s photography and Stuart’s sculpture, is setting this exhibit up to be one of the most unique shows here in Amarillo in quite some time,” Breeden said.

Bartolomeo and Peters attended KU together in the early ’80s, she said in an email.

Bartolomeo explained that her works are called “photograms,” an analogue process that allows images to be captured on light-sensitive paper without the use of a camera.

Snider, meanwhile, will display sculptures made from dead wood from high-altitude trees.

“They’re real gnarly and twisted looking,” Peters said. “He’s used all kinds of resins and layers and ends up taking them into another world.”

Peters’ own work is otherworldly, too.

“I think my mother had a lot to do with stimulating my imagination,” he said. “She would haul us in a red Radio Flyer wagon to the movies in the ’50s, way back before I could even walk ... ‘King Kong’ and all of the old sci-fi stuff.

“That left some real impressions on me,” he said. “Anything that was sort of offbeat or weird, that’s what got my attention.”